The transmission of messages to mobile devices is a widely used and popular service, and the major messaging types in the GSM network (Global System for Mobile Communications) are the Short Message Service (SMS) and the Multimedia Message Service (MMS). The messages are typically sent from and received by a user terminal such as mobile phone or Personal Digital Assistant (PDA). Mobile communication networks can also be used to send and receive other type of messages including electronic mail messages, voice messages, video messages, and picture messages.
Mobile marketing is widely considered by advertisers to be a significant channel for providing access to a consumer due to the fact that a mobile terminal is personal, it is “always on”, and, by virtue of collaborative communications, is implicitly a member of one or more groups. These characteristics, when combined with the social networks-based marketing approach of the Internet, are seen as having the potential to form a very powerful marketing base.
Today's mobile marketing is largely based on push campaigns that are designed to opt-in a consumer, or pull campaigns that acquire mobile phone numbers from consumers. The most typical example of the pull campaign is the “text-to-win” campaign, where e.g., a soft drink bottle contains a short code and a number, and the mobile user sends the code via a text message to the number. In return, the consumer receives a notification if they have won; irrespective of the winning status, the consumer also receives selected marketing messages or a series of messages that are broadcast to the mobile terminal. Another popular method is direct advertisement, which is typically performed using text and picture messaging.
A problem with these approaches is that they do not take account of the user's activities at the time of sending the promotional message. As a result a message can be sent at a time that is inconvenient for the user, causing the recipient to ignore and delete this and any subsequently received such messages; as a result the marketing efforts are completely wasted. U.S. Pat. No. 6,889,054 describes providing a user with the means for explicitly specifying times at which they are willing to receive promotional messages, this then being used to compile an advertisement schedule for pushing advertisements to the user. However, a problem with this approach is that it is relatively burdensome on the user, since, if the schedule is to capture appropriate times to send messages based on the user's activities, the schedule requires detailed input from the user.